It's happened: 1.00 USD = 1.00 CAD

This has good and bad ramifications. Canadians will be streaming over the border to buy our crap. The U.S. dollar could tank even more* and everyone starts switching to a stable currency like the Euro (can't wait until the Chinese do this).

Ok armchair economists...the thread is yours....

* Of course, the five year history is really not so bad, because it brings us maybe more in line with where we should be. It''s the next five years that could make life really interesting.

That is a very well written article. It is a very worrisome situation, more so by the day.

Just how much of the crisis is to do with that giant money sucking leech of Iraq draining the finance out of the country? I thought we were paying for the war with Iraqi oil! It's not supposed to cost us a thing! I guess as long as the war profiteers are getting their share, why bother with the details?

Another two countries to watch are Russia and Venezuela. They are considering (threatening some say)to sell their oil in rubles and pesos. Which would effectively destroy life in this country overnight. We're talking, seriously, 60-80% decrease in value of the USD in a 24 hour period.

Euros don't seem to be a bad investment now, even the Canadian dollar is good. It's not that the Euro is going up, it's that the dollar is crashing, hard. Almost any currency is a good bet compared to the dollar.

I'm running to Canada right now. I've heard that if I put my name on the hip replacement list now, I can probably have one by the time it is needed in my 80's.

This is called everyone riding the same horse until it is dead. They won't go anywhere either. Saudi Arabia kills the largest purchaser of oil on the planet by dumping currency. What happens to the price per barrel of oil when the United States can't buy?

China holds over a trillion dollars in debt and large parts of the economy are centered around exporting to the United States. Let that become worth a lot less and see what happens to China.

I could go on, but needless to say, prepare for BRIC ROW to take a tumble. The U.S. will go into recession. The suffering in other places will be worse. Hopefully someday we will learn.

The US company I work for moved their worldwide software and hardware development to Waterloo a few years ago after they bought out a local software company. Later, they also moved most of their customer support staff up here. In a large part these moves were due to the low Canadian dollar at the time, though it was mainly because the developers in the Canadian company they bought were head and shoulders above their US counterparts and the Canadian product line was to become the flagship product.

Waterloo in particular has always had a large number of major tech companies locate or open dev offices here because of the cheap, educated and skilled labour pool (RIM, Google, OpenText, Agfa, IBM, DesireToLearn are a few). I wonder how long until these companies start relocating back to the US now that their Canadian employees are no longer the great value in salaries they once were...I really don't want to move to the US.

"My 8th grade math teacher once said: "You can't help it if you're dumb, you are born that way. But stupid is self inflicted."" -Hiro.

QUESTION: Do you think there’s a risk of a recession? How do you rate that?

BUSH: You know, you need to talk to economists. I think I got a B in Econ 101. I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low and being fiscally responsible with the people’s money.

Quote:

UPDATE: Michael Roston takes a look back at Bush’s college transcripts. Bush received grades of 71 and 72 in Economics — a grade that “would correspond with a C-.”

If anyone gets confused with me calling Bush a retard let me clear this up, from now on I will only mention him as a retard, monkey or moron. It's what he deserves for the last 7 years and next 16 months.

I can feel the new era lurking just over the horizon. Jesus should return just about any minute now. Bwahahahahaha

Quote:

My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called "Max". To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. And the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max. The warrior Max. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything. And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again...

for the rest of us that aren't going to be raptured away, i'd suggest we invest in a bit of Gold and learn to read the stars - this is detailed in the Bible as the story of Jesus - so we know when to plant our crops. Bring on the Aquarian era where the meek inherit the earth. F'ing right mate!

1 - prices at wal-mart go up
2 - foreigners start buying up US real estate
3 - the US treasury has trouble getting people to buy debt
4 - as a result of #3, they have to raise interest rates. When they have
plenty of customers they can tailor interest rates to control unemployment
and inflation. When they have few customers, they are forced to raise
rates, and the Fed loses control of inflation and unemployment.
5 - outsourcing would slow down, as outside countries labor becomes more
expensive
6 - as the Fed raises rates to get debt customers, we start to see deflation
and unemployment

1 - prices at wal-mart go up
2 - foreigners start buying up US real estate
3 - the US treasury has trouble getting people to buy debt
4 - as a result of #3, they have to raise interest rates. When they have
plenty of customers they can tailor interest rates to control unemployment
and inflation. When they have few customers, they are forced to raise
rates, and the Fed loses control of inflation and unemployment.
5 - outsourcing would slow down, as outside countries labor becomes more
expensive
6 - as the Fed raises rates to get debt customers, we start to see deflation
and unemployment

Lucky for me, most of my net worth is outside the US.

Its going to be much worse than that!

Lucky for me, all my net worth is in my mind, so whatever happens I come out the other side exactly the same as I am now! Good luck suckers.

1 - prices at wal-mart go up
2 - foreigners start buying up US real estate
3 - the US treasury has trouble getting people to buy debt
4 - as a result of #3, they have to raise interest rates. When they have
plenty of customers they can tailor interest rates to control unemployment
and inflation. When they have few customers, they are forced to raise
rates, and the Fed loses control of inflation and unemployment.
5 - outsourcing would slow down, as outside countries labor becomes more
expensive
6 - as the Fed raises rates to get debt customers, we start to see deflation
and unemployment

If it got bad enough, we might see a devaluation of the dollar (like a reverse split, where "New Dollars" get traded for old dollars 100-1 or something). Are there any economists on the board? Is my description above accurate or likely?

Everything is conspiring. The roman empire didn't fall for any one particular reason, a plethora of things were stacked against it, and it just disintegrated from within. Its all tender-hooks at the moment, poised on the edge waiting to tip. As soon as people get spooked in the stock-market, all these things are going to hit at once, then...boom, all these little snowballs are going to merge into one unstoppable lump and flatten civilization...

Anyway, im just pulling a few legs, because its fun.

I doub't there will be many religious people around afterwards, they'll probably end up killing eachother blaming eachother for their stupidity in not realising what the bible was really talking about.

The Roman empire fell because they used lead pipes to transport water. I just don't buy apocalypse scenarios - we survived the 1929 stock market crash and the depression, Mexico survived the devaluation of its currency, and WWII and the Cold War were pretty bad also. I don't think this will be as bad.

And there are benefits to devaluation - the national debt will be worth less because it will be traded 100-1 for new dollars or whatever.

The Roman empire fell because they used lead pipes to transport water. I just don't buy apocalypse scenarios - we survived the 1929 stock market crash and the depression, Mexico survived the devaluation of its currency, and WWII and the Cold War were pretty bad also. I don't think this will be as bad.

And there are benefits to devaluation - the national debt will be worth less because it will be traded 100-1 for new dollars or whatever.

the world was a very small place in those days, even the worst things that could happen didn't effect much else for very long.

The difference then was that people were real, they knew how to survive. We dont know shit about life today because of our technology. And the world is a much bigger place today, yet it is very small really. If someone pulls the plug, no matter where we are, we're all doing down the crapper together. Haha.

PS. You dont really think the roman empire fell because 0.00001% of the population had their water delivered by lead pipes do you???

1 - prices at wal-mart go up
2 - foreigners start buying up US real estate
3 - the US treasury has trouble getting people to buy debt
4 - as a result of #3, they have to raise interest rates. When they have
plenty of customers they can tailor interest rates to control unemployment
and inflation. When they have few customers, they are forced to raise
rates, and the Fed loses control of inflation and unemployment.
5 - outsourcing would slow down, as outside countries labor becomes more
expensive
6 - as the Fed raises rates to get debt customers, we start to see deflation
and unemployment

BUSH: You know, you need to talk to economists. I think I got a B in Econ 101. I got an A, however, in keeping taxes low and being fiscally responsible with the peoples money.
.

I laughed out loud at the TV when I heard him say that today. Remarkably and stunningly full of shit. Never met a big-government spending bill that he didn't sign. And BTW, Mr. President, offering an expensive Amnesty package is NOT being fiscally responsible. It's called breaking the bank.

Prices go up for foreign goods due to exchange rate effects, and then margins (for both producers and retailers) start to go down because fewer people are buying things due to higher interest rates. They are two conflicting forces acting on prices. But Mr. Bush is ahead of me, he got a B in Econ 101, and I never took any economics courses at all (I did take all the first and 2nd year math courses at my university though).